Gina McKinnon

500 Essential Cult Books is the rarest of its breed, a glossy coffee-table book that is as informative as it is attractive. With one or two books per page, accompanied by insightful comments and additional reading suggestions, a lifetime of potential reading material is at your disposal. From classic to controversial, but never common, you're bound to find something you've never heard of within these pages. You could probably read the book front to back, but there is possibly more pleasure to be derived from casually flipping through to works you are familiar with just to see what else has been included in the same category. With access to the internet and information being almost universal, there aren't many "guides" that are worthy of taking up shelf space. This is one of the good ones, grab it if you can.… (mehr)

I find books like this--the Rough Guides to various sorts of books, including cult, come to mind--fun to read, despite their being pretty lightweight and very much subjective, though given the premises for them subjectivity and absence of serious criticism is to be expected.

McKinnon divides her books into 10 categories, like the seedy, young adults, sci-fi, one-of-a-kind and doesn't make a bad job of it in commenting on the books, although I would never have bothered looking at some of the ones I quite liked on the basis of her summaries. For each book she lists a few other supposedly similar ones, and here she strays a bit. Well, a lot, at times. Only the most relaxed sort of free association leads from Hero with a Thousand Faces to Babbitt, surely. But balancing this drawback is that non-fiction and comics are scattered freely through the various categories.

The photographs of the different covers many of the titles have been issued with are quite interesting. There is, though, a serious problem with the book's layout. The margins are cluttered with whacking great labels for suggested reading ages, book titles, chapter titles, and more still. It's visually confusing and this matters. When the pages stick together (they often do) or when is looking for a specific page, one's eyes dance about looking for the page number somewhere amongst all the other numbers in the margins. And I was nearly 100 pages into the book before I noticed that amidst the marginal clutter were star ratings given to the books.

In the end, I packed Essential Cult Books off to the charity shop. It's the sort of book best bought at a charity shop price, read and enjoyed, and returned to that same shop.… (mehr)